It seems like every other top level reply in this thread is people poking holes in it based on their personal speculation about the details.

I can’t get over people saying “any day now bro, just give it a month” to shut down any kind of nuanced discussion on the topic, or to downplay the fact that damage is already happening today

That’s not what the claim was though, was it. Someone said Excel also mangles files and your counter seems to be that no it doesn’t because you’ve got users who use it. But the one thing does not automatically follow from the other.

SOURCE: Sysadmin for several companies,

So, not actually an Excel power user then.

To anyone thinking “LibreOffice still has issues”, here’s the LibreOffice donation page to help them fix it up and be rid of MS Office forever.

companies whose global revenues exceed €750 million, effectively targeting larger U.S. tech companies

For me the brass-neckedness of this is that as soon as it comes to tax, all the big “U.S.” companies are actually Irish, Bermudan and Caymanian companies.

Generally (for most countries that do this, I haven’t researched Poland) the point is that traditional (non-digital) companies have always paid import duties, usually much higher than 3%, when goods are physically imported. Digital goods by their nature have effectively been skirting the system for a few decades and paying zero tax, and it’s not good for local businesses to be in a situation where they’re paying a bunch of taxes locally but foreign businesses competing in the same market get to just skip it.

The $750M requirement is likely because the amount of paperwork required for a small business to correctly calculate, process and pay that tax would be prohibitively expensive for them to sell their service to Polish customers, and they don’t want a situation where small businesses just straight up refuse to sell in Poland.

Before Google came along, most search engines were manually curated. I’m disappointed that nobody’s had any success bringing that concept back. They always cave in and take the cheap route by trying to make the general public & algorithms rate things, which of course instantly gets gamed to uselessness.

I was on a project a while back that used Ruby, and what I concluded was that cute things like that look good at first glance if you’re skim-reading some already-correct code, but are pretty much a net wash in terms of writing or debugging code.

It’s not unusual for people to think that code would be better if it scanned like regular English, but the problem is that English is woefully imprecise and doesn’t always correlate to what kind of operations get run by the code, and so you still end up having to learn all that syntax and mentally process it like any other programming language anyway, but now you’ve also got a bunch of false friends tricking you into thinking they do one thing but actually they do another.

(also, the bulk of the text in that python example is the import statement, which is like… ok so what, it’s not like Ruby doesn’t have its own dependency hell problems)

Even if it’s not malicious, it’s still a case of a company sitting on more cash reserves than most small countries, and just choosing not to do better on their moderation systems.

Same here. It’s popular to rag on leetcode-style technical interviews, and yet it’s astonishing how many CS grads with 3 years experience we get in who can’t seem to get through even the most basic “reverse this array”, “find the longest substring” type questions in the language they claim to be strongest in.

People sign up for CS degrees because they see high salaries, but don’t realize those salaries are for the high achievers who have been coding since the age of 10 and are writing code for fun in the evenings as well. Then they flood the market, only to discover that no companies have need of someone who cheesed their way through college, have never written more than a few hundred lines of code their whole life, and have no useful skills to offer.

I’m probably going to cop a few downvotes for this, but in my whole career the only software engineers I ever met who were worth a damn were people who loved it for its own sake, and would be doing it regardless. So, if your feelings about the field are such that you’re thinking you might be better off doing a trade, you’d definitely be better off doing a trade.

Good luck either way.

The comments section of the LinkedIn post I saw about this, has ten times the cope of some of the AI bro posts in here. I had to log out before I accidentally replied to one.

See also the entire American Indochina war, where they tried to bomb Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos into being friends with them

The company has found ways to avoid some of the regulations that banks are held to

If you look at all the unicorns of the past few decades, a surprisingly large number of them did it with software that wasn’t in any way technologically advanced, but exploited technology to find loopholes in the kind of industry regulations that were there to stop companies from screwing people over.

PayPal was a way to do banking without registering as a bank. Uber, Doordash and other gig economy apps are exercises in sidestepping employment law. Airbnb, despite its origins as a couchsurfing app, didn’t get huge until professional “hosts” started using it as a way to run apartment hotels without having to meet the expectations or obligations of one.

If you want to build a tech unicorn, all you need to ask yourself is, “how can I make something 5% more convenient and 200% more shit?”.

It’s got all the worst parts of extreme anti-fraud measures, like freezing your account and holding onto your money just because you did something suspicious like receive money, but without actually protecting anyone from fraud.

Yes. As others in this thread have explained, they’re approaching peak coal and that line is not one that you can extrapolate upwards as a straight line into the future.

I also think it’s not reasonable to compare a developing/emerging economy with hugely increasing total energy requirements, with ones that already got their polluting growth phase out of the way in the 19th-20th centuries, especially when a very significant part of that coal is burned in the service of making consumer products for the latter. It’d be much more reasonable to compare them to India, which oh look, they are doing much better than in both current percentage and growth rate. Whilst it’s true that Africa is doing better in those graphs, they’re also not having nearly as much success in production or growth terms.

So overall, yeah it could be better on paper, but it’s very much treating perfect as the enemy of good and preaching at a country who built as much TWh solar&wind capacity just in the last 12 months of your graph alone, as the USA has over its entire lifetime.

(I was about to draw a few more conclusions from those graphs but noticed they’ve left out a bunch of other energy sources for no obvious reason, possibly mischief, so I can’t compare - the graphs imply that these regions are replacing coal with solar&wind, but without the data for total consumption including gas, nuclear, hydro etc we don’t actually know what the true situation is.)

There’s such a huge gap between what I read about GPT-5 online, versus the overwhelmingly disappointing results I get from it for both coding and general questions.

I’m beginning to think we’re in the end stages of Dead Internet, where basically nothing you see online has any connection to reality.

Your own graph shows the ratio of renewables to coal hugely shooting up in the last 4 years.

How naïve it was of me, to think that the New York Avianca case in 2023 was high profile enough for lawyers to have learnt their lesson, but nope, it’s getting worse each and every month that goes by:

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

It doesn’t help that the most common outcomes there are “Warning” or a fine in the low thousands. If a legal practice can save $500,000 a year on avoiding doing their own research, and the worse that’s likely to happen is “Warning” or a $2,000 fine, then why would they not?